This article, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland that has not been explored anthropologically before turns out to be an interesting experience. On the one hand, the identity of being a native of the region carves out ways in the field that help her overcome barriers; on the other hand, the same identity, through her common ethnic and cultural belonging, kinship relations, and local familiarity restricts her in many ways. Through explorations of her identity in the field along gender, caste, class, and ethnic lines, the work highlights how sometimes she is an insider, sometimes an outsider, and sometimes a partial-insider-outsider, thereby collapsing the strict division of a researcher into categories of an outsider and an insider.
{"title":"Insecurities of nativism","authors":"Malvika Sharma","doi":"10.1086/719413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719413","url":null,"abstract":"This article, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland that has not been explored anthropologically before turns out to be an interesting experience. On the one hand, the identity of being a native of the region carves out ways in the field that help her overcome barriers; on the other hand, the same identity, through her common ethnic and cultural belonging, kinship relations, and local familiarity restricts her in many ways. Through explorations of her identity in the field along gender, caste, class, and ethnic lines, the work highlights how sometimes she is an insider, sometimes an outsider, and sometimes a partial-insider-outsider, thereby collapsing the strict division of a researcher into categories of an outsider and an insider.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"114 1","pages":"126 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85495490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the great pleasures in reading Harriet Evans’s Beijing from below is how it subverts on two levels. One is to show how the socialist state failed to control the capital’s underclass: despite numerous disciplinary projects, the neighborhood of Dashalar remained independent in spirit, at least until state-sponsored gentrification killed it. Here we see the reform-oriented state, eager to get rid of what it imagines to be social diseases (primarily petty commerce and pleasure) that Dashalar exemplified, with scant regard for its inhabitants. The second is that it calls into question how so much of contemporary history, and especially contemporary Chinese history, is written and understood. Evans shows how indispensable it is to combine three facets of information gathering: archives, ethnography, and oral history. Too oftenwe read books that only deal with archives (the classic historical approach) or with oral history (which we might think of as journalistic, although of course not exclusively). Evans shows how these methods should be combined with the ethnographic insights of observing a place. To me, her approach should be self-evident, but her need to justify her methodology shows the problematic siloing of academic disciplines. Also laudatory is her desire to keep the residents’ real names (p. xvii). It is unfortunate that she ended up, against their will, changing their names, but such are the paternalistic conventions of much of modern-day social sciences. As a journalist who worked in China for more
{"title":"The death of urban China","authors":"I. Johnson","doi":"10.1086/717184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717184","url":null,"abstract":"One of the great pleasures in reading Harriet Evans’s Beijing from below is how it subverts on two levels. One is to show how the socialist state failed to control the capital’s underclass: despite numerous disciplinary projects, the neighborhood of Dashalar remained independent in spirit, at least until state-sponsored gentrification killed it. Here we see the reform-oriented state, eager to get rid of what it imagines to be social diseases (primarily petty commerce and pleasure) that Dashalar exemplified, with scant regard for its inhabitants. The second is that it calls into question how so much of contemporary history, and especially contemporary Chinese history, is written and understood. Evans shows how indispensable it is to combine three facets of information gathering: archives, ethnography, and oral history. Too oftenwe read books that only deal with archives (the classic historical approach) or with oral history (which we might think of as journalistic, although of course not exclusively). Evans shows how these methods should be combined with the ethnographic insights of observing a place. To me, her approach should be self-evident, but her need to justify her methodology shows the problematic siloing of academic disciplines. Also laudatory is her desire to keep the residents’ real names (p. xvii). It is unfortunate that she ended up, against their will, changing their names, but such are the paternalistic conventions of much of modern-day social sciences. As a journalist who worked in China for more","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"12 1","pages":"296 - 298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84885154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Early in Gail Hershatter’s The gender of memory: Rural women and China’s collective past (2011) something becomes clear about the nature of memory. Hershatter’s interlocutors, women from rural Shaanxi Province, had lived through the end of the old Republic, through land reform, collectivization, and famine, through the Great Leap Forward and theCulturalRevolution.Alongside their fathers, husbands, and brothers, they had sat through the same reeducation meetings where they were taught to “speak bitterness.” But, while men’s accounts followed the patterning of orthodox history, frequently women’s accountsdidnot.And,whenwomendidrecall apivotal event, the memory was often made material. Hershatter notes that, while “all the women we interviewed understood the term ‘Great Leap Forward,’ . . . none of them used it in describing theirownhistories.Theydidnot see theGreatLeap as a unified national phenomenon; their version of local campaign time disaggregated it into constituent elements that had meaning for them. They talked about ‘the time whenwesmelted steel’or ‘the timewhenweate in collective dininghalls’”(2011:26).“Everymemory,”Hershatternotes, “is also a creation—not necessarily awhole-cloth invention (although there are those), but a product of the confluence of past events and present circumstances” (2011: 22). Hershatter’s careful rendering of the nature of memory, and her articulation of the fact that orthodox chro-
{"title":"When “the state” is the absence of a sour red date","authors":"Ruth E. Toulson","doi":"10.1086/717258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717258","url":null,"abstract":"Early in Gail Hershatter’s The gender of memory: Rural women and China’s collective past (2011) something becomes clear about the nature of memory. Hershatter’s interlocutors, women from rural Shaanxi Province, had lived through the end of the old Republic, through land reform, collectivization, and famine, through the Great Leap Forward and theCulturalRevolution.Alongside their fathers, husbands, and brothers, they had sat through the same reeducation meetings where they were taught to “speak bitterness.” But, while men’s accounts followed the patterning of orthodox history, frequently women’s accountsdidnot.And,whenwomendidrecall apivotal event, the memory was often made material. Hershatter notes that, while “all the women we interviewed understood the term ‘Great Leap Forward,’ . . . none of them used it in describing theirownhistories.Theydidnot see theGreatLeap as a unified national phenomenon; their version of local campaign time disaggregated it into constituent elements that had meaning for them. They talked about ‘the time whenwesmelted steel’or ‘the timewhenweate in collective dininghalls’”(2011:26).“Everymemory,”Hershatternotes, “is also a creation—not necessarily awhole-cloth invention (although there are those), but a product of the confluence of past events and present circumstances” (2011: 22). Hershatter’s careful rendering of the nature of memory, and her articulation of the fact that orthodox chro-","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"14 1","pages":"303 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90323101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the Quechua community of Coipasi (Bolivia) relations between the living and the dead (almas—souls) swing between excess and containment, remembrance and distancing. The aim of this article is to show that the emotivity of the spirits plays a fundamental role in these relations. Like all matters pertaining to the nature of spirits, this emotivity is excessive but also, and most importantly, it appears to the extent that the souls of the dead feel alienated from family and community social practices. This is reflected in the local notion of “nonremembrance” (mana yuyacunchu). I therefore suggest that an ethnography of the emotivity of spirits offers a better understanding of such common concepts in the anthropology of the Andes as commensality, excess, and the very notion of the soul.
{"title":"Emotivity and excess of spirits in the Andes","authors":"Óscar Muñoz Morán","doi":"10.1086/719236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719236","url":null,"abstract":"In the Quechua community of Coipasi (Bolivia) relations between the living and the dead (almas—souls) swing between excess and containment, remembrance and distancing. The aim of this article is to show that the emotivity of the spirits plays a fundamental role in these relations. Like all matters pertaining to the nature of spirits, this emotivity is excessive but also, and most importantly, it appears to the extent that the souls of the dead feel alienated from family and community social practices. This is reflected in the local notion of “nonremembrance” (mana yuyacunchu). I therefore suggest that an ethnography of the emotivity of spirits offers a better understanding of such common concepts in the anthropology of the Andes as commensality, excess, and the very notion of the soul.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"13 1","pages":"63 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88892343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to the abolitionist call for “letting anthropology burn” by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline’s intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as “concepts,” and not as “ours.”
{"title":"Burning translations","authors":"Milad Odabaei","doi":"10.1086/719659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719659","url":null,"abstract":"This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to the abolitionist call for “letting anthropology burn” by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline’s intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as “concepts,” and not as “ours.”","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"33 1","pages":"277 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87970329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by considering comparative urban and heritage studies within the framework of collaborative ethnography with informal workers, the unemployed, and other local residents. It asks how to engage “new” researchers in the community to study that community—in this case, those impacted by heritage redevelopment at two sites: in South East London and West Bengal. The paper is conceived as a contribution to ethnographic methodologies in urban anthropology, arguing in support of inclusive and responsive approaches to knowledge creation in the social sciences.
{"title":"Comparative urbanism and collective methodologies","authors":"John Hutnyk","doi":"10.1086/718528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718528","url":null,"abstract":"Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have particular importance for port city heritage redevelopment, while asking how ethical ethnographic research can still be done. It evaluates ongoing research on two recent maritime restoration projects by considering comparative urban and heritage studies within the framework of collaborative ethnography with informal workers, the unemployed, and other local residents. It asks how to engage “new” researchers in the community to study that community—in this case, those impacted by heritage redevelopment at two sites: in South East London and West Bengal. The paper is conceived as a contribution to ethnographic methodologies in urban anthropology, arguing in support of inclusive and responsive approaches to knowledge creation in the social sciences.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"3 1","pages":"184 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90158883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
According to Latour, religion and science have nothing in common. The two are successful (or failing) in quite different ways. Religiousness is not aimed at fact-making, but at presence-making, he says. To critically reconsider these ideas, I discuss the case study of Marian apparitions in Litmanová, Slovakia. The study suggests a more complicated picture by not focusing on pure and ready-made religion, but rather on religion in the making, a kind of “almost-religion.” It shows how the reality of apparitions, initially of quite unclear status, was becoming more and more religious. Fact-making and fact-checking clearly belonged to this trajectory and have never stopped being relevant. Nonetheless, together with how the apparition was progressively becoming truly religious (or religiously true), Latourian presence-making was gaining in importance.
{"title":"Religion in action","authors":"Zdenek Konopásek","doi":"10.1086/718933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718933","url":null,"abstract":"According to Latour, religion and science have nothing in common. The two are successful (or failing) in quite different ways. Religiousness is not aimed at fact-making, but at presence-making, he says. To critically reconsider these ideas, I discuss the case study of Marian apparitions in Litmanová, Slovakia. The study suggests a more complicated picture by not focusing on pure and ready-made religion, but rather on religion in the making, a kind of “almost-religion.” It shows how the reality of apparitions, initially of quite unclear status, was becoming more and more religious. Fact-making and fact-checking clearly belonged to this trajectory and have never stopped being relevant. Nonetheless, together with how the apparition was progressively becoming truly religious (or religiously true), Latourian presence-making was gaining in importance.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"10 1","pages":"170 - 183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90376687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is a recurring image in the work of the philosopher Michel Serres, that of the sun in Plato’s Republic (which makes its appearance in the famous allegory of the cave). The Platonic sun, says Serres, is “unique and total,” the single, scintillating source of truth and knowledge (Serres 1997: 42). But a shift in position—a transformation of perspective—allows us to see that “the central sun is nothing but a marginal star, a yellowish and mediocre dwarf, without true grandeur, in the immense concert of supergiants, red like Betelgeuse or blue like Rigel” (1997: 150). That is to say, Serres aims to question how it is that “our knowledge unjustifiably established the local solar system as a general law” (1997: 41), and his strategic countermove is instead to shift perspective, to pan back and imagine an expanded cosmos, in which Plato’s sun becomes one of many (see Watkin 2020: 53– 54; Blake 2014: 3–4). This, at any rate, was the image I had in mind when I endedmy article, musing onMaussian moons andmultiple suns. The paper is something of an oddity, to be sure, for it is not an ethnographically grounded case study; nor does it pretend to be a comprehensive investigation of translation in general; nor, yet again, is it a reflection on the conditions of possibility of ethnography (as Pina-Cabral frames the issue).What it is instead is merely an attempt to map out, in a very basic way, the coordinates for the felicity conditions of two opposing modes of anthropological translation and their attendant effects. To the extent, then, that the paper is an oddity, I am all the more grateful toHAU for deeming it to be worthy of publication in the first place, and I am especially indebted to the participants in this colloquium, for generously offering their considered criticisms. An exchange of this nature, consisting of comments on commentaries and replies to replies, can quickly become subject to what J. L. Austin once called “the law of diminishing fleas” (1979: 154), where my remarks—
{"title":"How to do things with worlds","authors":"Philip Swift","doi":"10.1086/719520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719520","url":null,"abstract":"There is a recurring image in the work of the philosopher Michel Serres, that of the sun in Plato’s Republic (which makes its appearance in the famous allegory of the cave). The Platonic sun, says Serres, is “unique and total,” the single, scintillating source of truth and knowledge (Serres 1997: 42). But a shift in position—a transformation of perspective—allows us to see that “the central sun is nothing but a marginal star, a yellowish and mediocre dwarf, without true grandeur, in the immense concert of supergiants, red like Betelgeuse or blue like Rigel” (1997: 150). That is to say, Serres aims to question how it is that “our knowledge unjustifiably established the local solar system as a general law” (1997: 41), and his strategic countermove is instead to shift perspective, to pan back and imagine an expanded cosmos, in which Plato’s sun becomes one of many (see Watkin 2020: 53– 54; Blake 2014: 3–4). This, at any rate, was the image I had in mind when I endedmy article, musing onMaussian moons andmultiple suns. The paper is something of an oddity, to be sure, for it is not an ethnographically grounded case study; nor does it pretend to be a comprehensive investigation of translation in general; nor, yet again, is it a reflection on the conditions of possibility of ethnography (as Pina-Cabral frames the issue).What it is instead is merely an attempt to map out, in a very basic way, the coordinates for the felicity conditions of two opposing modes of anthropological translation and their attendant effects. To the extent, then, that the paper is an oddity, I am all the more grateful toHAU for deeming it to be worthy of publication in the first place, and I am especially indebted to the participants in this colloquium, for generously offering their considered criticisms. An exchange of this nature, consisting of comments on commentaries and replies to replies, can quickly become subject to what J. L. Austin once called “the law of diminishing fleas” (1979: 154), where my remarks—","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"29 1","pages":"285 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89754338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The “ontological turn” has been in fashion right from the start in anthropology; and its challenges (and misunderstandings) arise whenever two minds meet (for example, the inquiring anthropologist and her interlocutor) and there is a misalignment between their metaphysical beliefs. I tried to face up to some of those challenges at an interdisciplinary conference titled “Magical Thinking and Food Today” held in Paris on October 19–20, 1994, organized by the French anthropologist Claude Fischler. I am grateful to Carlos Londoño-Sulkin and Luiz Costa for encouraging me to publish the unearthed English version of that talk and thus place it in a contemporary theoretical light.
{"title":"The illusions of “magical thinking”: Whose chimera, ours or theirs?","authors":"Richard A. Shweder","doi":"10.1086/719289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719289","url":null,"abstract":"The “ontological turn” has been in fashion right from the start in anthropology; and its challenges (and misunderstandings) arise whenever two minds meet (for example, the inquiring anthropologist and her interlocutor) and there is a misalignment between their metaphysical beliefs. I tried to face up to some of those challenges at an interdisciplinary conference titled “Magical Thinking and Food Today” held in Paris on October 19–20, 1994, organized by the French anthropologist Claude Fischler. I am grateful to Carlos Londoño-Sulkin and Luiz Costa for encouraging me to publish the unearthed English version of that talk and thus place it in a contemporary theoretical light.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":"319 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78527756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The critique of belief as an analytical tool in anthropology has overshadowed belief as an ethnographic reality. This article short-circuits these debates over the politics of belief by elaborating ethnographically the indigenous use of the concept—literally the Spanish “creer” and “creencia”—in Shuar territory in post-conversion Amazonia. It shows that contemporary Shuar “belief” supersedes assumptions about belief as an epistemic commitment. The Shuar concept combines the Christian emphasis on conversion with a relatively stable ancestral notion about the meaning and social significance of knowledge, one that emphasizes its instrumentality, as opposed to the ideology of the truth-seeking cogito striving to make accurate representations of the world. These arguments are advanced by presenting ethnographic material from two distinct sites in Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador: one in which most people claim to “believe” in shamanic healing and ancestral visionary practices, and one in which they do not.
{"title":"Contemporary Shuar beliefs","authors":"Christian Tym","doi":"10.1086/718962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718962","url":null,"abstract":"The critique of belief as an analytical tool in anthropology has overshadowed belief as an ethnographic reality. This article short-circuits these debates over the politics of belief by elaborating ethnographically the indigenous use of the concept—literally the Spanish “creer” and “creencia”—in Shuar territory in post-conversion Amazonia. It shows that contemporary Shuar “belief” supersedes assumptions about belief as an epistemic commitment. The Shuar concept combines the Christian emphasis on conversion with a relatively stable ancestral notion about the meaning and social significance of knowledge, one that emphasizes its instrumentality, as opposed to the ideology of the truth-seeking cogito striving to make accurate representations of the world. These arguments are advanced by presenting ethnographic material from two distinct sites in Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador: one in which most people claim to “believe” in shamanic healing and ancestral visionary practices, and one in which they do not.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"17 1","pages":"93 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78256750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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